BCLA2016: Salvage considers the international and transnational circulation of textuality in the broadest comparative and historical terms, not merely as a process that involves the perceived colossi of literature, but one that also charts the byways and alleyways of literary production, the sometimes hidden or obscured debts to individuals, coteries, and literary movements that might have formed (or will one day inform) other or new literary histories.

2016 is also the 400th anniversary of the deaths of Cervantes and Shakespeare, two writers whose lives and works have been salvaged from historical documents, bad quartos, and hearsay so successfully that we hardly question their authenticity. Like any salvage operation, however, literary history has not only attempted to reconstitute the corpa of its hallowed authors, but it has also sanctioned generations of succeeding writers who have reused, recycled, and redeployed words, meanings, and forms through translation, parody, homage, pastiche, adaptation, allusion, intertextuality, and imitation. Salvage, too, knows no borders, as the mighty wrecks of Shakespeare and Cervantes demonstrate: while reclaimed for nationalist narratives, their works have been incorporated into the fabrics of many languages, literatures, and cultural settings.